is this a manufactured demand meme
That's exactly what it is.
Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
361–370 of 636 posts
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#362Apple was also allegedly "caught off guard" by the Macbook Neo demand. I don't really see how they couldn't see the Local AI demand or demand for a cheaper Macbooks. This just reads like marketing imo.
There are probably people in Apple who think desktop is dead or pro-only and didn’t think many people would want a lower end cheaper Mac. Why wouldn’t they just get an iPad?
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#363It's fun to see that even an extremely large company can find unexpected product market fit [0]. Per this article, "The company reportedly did not possess an engineering team dedicated to business customers or staff focused on developer relations, and lacked an enterprise AI strategy." That sounds insane in retrospect, but I think there's just inherent uncertainty in what people actually need and will use things for.…
You should listen to the podcast Acquired, specifically Nvidia and then Jensen Huang. They basically lucked into AI. Some researcher was using Nvidia gaming cards, and reached out to them about questions on CUDA. That email eventually turned them into a trillion dollar question.
I might have believe this story, if not at the same time Intel had made an expensive bet on producing not-quite-gaming cards, later looked at the same trillion dollar question.. and then almost decided that this did not bring enough luck to keep spending.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I’ve been seeing, the Mac studios do look like they have potential. I was looking to drop $10k-$15k on one until recently. After comparing a Radeon 7900 XTX vs Ryzen Halos 128GB vs M1 MacBook Pro 64Gb, I landed on just getting an external closure setup with Nvidia RTX 5090. The model I’m specifically targeting to use at high speeds is Qwen 3.8 27b @q4ks. This model actually proved to be good at coding (it s…
try ninfer once you get your 5090 https://github.com/Neroued/ninfer
Thanks for sharing, I'm definitely trying it out after I get through my project milestones for the 5090. The README claims 700tok/s for Qwen 3.8 27b, that would be amazing, I'm only expecting an increase from my ~50tok/s on my Radeon to 200tok/s on the 5090.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#365just a real bummer that they raised the prices so much
Which is why Apple is going to need to design around again and do something about that in house if you can design and engineer a processor or a modem you can certainly do something about memory and SSD’s, Apple buying PA Semi, Intrinsity and Anobit led to Apple Silicon, buying Infineon led to a new Apple modem the capabilities is there and the money is there in house it may take two-four years but long-term I don’t think there is any other choice.
One thing to watch for when Apple introduces the new phones coming up shortly is whether or not Apple has replaced Qualcomm in their flagship smart phones because that is coming up soon Qualcomm has given warning to their investors.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#366Apple was also allegedly "caught off guard" by the Macbook Neo demand. I don't really see how they couldn't see the Local AI demand or demand for a cheaper Macbooks. This just reads like marketing imo.
There are probably people in Apple who think desktop is dead or pro-only and didn’t think many people would want a lower end cheaper Mac. Why wouldn’t they just get an iPad?
Even with the newer keyboard, the iPad just doesn't work for me as a MacBook replacement. And really isn't lighter at that point. Yes, an iPad is better for watching movies on a plane but that's not really a reason to bring one relative to a MacBook Air when I could also just bring a Kindle Paperwhite which weighs nothing. I've tried and an iPad basically doesn't work for me.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#367Apple was also allegedly "caught off guard" by the Macbook Neo demand. I don't really see how they couldn't see the Local AI demand or demand for a cheaper Macbooks. This just reads like marketing imo.
I don't think you need the scare quotes. product lifecycles can take years and the actual neo demand was actually pretty insane. They were using it to soak up demand for binned a18 chips and it would have been irresponsible to forecast that they'd have the demand they did when there's another perfectly reasonable universe where 8 gigs was too much of a compromise and it flopped. this article's also about enterprise d…
A lot of big enterprises struggle with ai adoption. Either they can't get models/tools approved fast enough, can't provision them in their internal network, or get slammed with exorbitant inference costs.
A big enterprise can drop one (or 4) of these on someone's desk and let them go nuts.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I realize I’m somewhat limited (16GB RTX 9070), but still, it seems really far off from the kind of experience even a basic $20/month subscription gets me. I just ordered a new Mac Studio M5 Max 128GB $5899 ($6400 with tax) to be able to run the bigger "consumer size" models in the 70B parameter range (~96 GB). That said, I have no illusions that this expensive setup with a Qwen Flash coding LLM will be comparable t…
I think the M5U Ultra 96gb is the sweetspot in that price range. It has more compute and bandwidth so you get to run models better sized to its hardware. I believe the Max would be too slow; personally I'm getting this SKU because I think it'd suck to get the 128gb Max and then discover it's too slow, and end up just using cloud providers anyway.
I agree about getting the Ultra if you're interested in AI (LLM) inference speed. I'm a little perplexed as to why there isn't a RAM option in between 96GB and 256GB, though. For instance, I believe Deepseek v4 flash runs a lot faster on (https://github.com/antirez/ds4) with 128GB than 96. I assume the higher SKUs have low enough sales that Apple doesn't want to be manufacturing too many different RAM configs as that would eat into their margins. (I say this as someone interested in AI hardware in general, even the 96GB is out of my price range).
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
A new base model mac mini is $900. That is 45 month of Gemini. Gemini 4.7 Flash will give better OCR results that Qwen or GLM w/ 10GB.
having a 64GB mac mini m4 pro the last few years with some increasingly capable usefulness has kept me interested in this stuff in a way that using a paid platform wouldn't have. Similar to running K8s in a homelab, something about interacting with the hardware makes it more engaging/interesting, for me at least. In general, I'm a big believer in doing more with fewer resources, within reason, and think having local…
I guess it depends on what you're trying to do. I've run a few LLMs on my 64gig Mac but anything image or video related is ridiculously slow compared to even old NVidia on my PC.
Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
#370I'm convinced that this is just guerilla marketing from Apple. When this started spreading a day or two ago, it was all from no-name spam media sites that are paid to publish articles. They all claimed "a source" is where they got the intel, without specifying the source. It was spreading like wildfire on socials. The same thing happened with Mac Mini's and OpenClaw. Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for Ope…
I am using Mac studios for local inference, but not for openclaw. It was simply the best bang for the buck at the time, and the software side of things has gotten even better since then. I haven’t run the pricing comparison but I have a feeling with the direction they’re heading that it’s better to hold off for m6 as it may assuage various bottlenecks if you are latency sensitive.